Musk’s future as Twitter head depends on polls

Elon Musk has asked the users on Twitter on whether he should leave his position as the head of social media platform and step down as he promised to abide by whatever are the results of his poll. The poll was posted on the Twitter platform by Musk after he acknowledged his mistake of launching new speech restrictions under which mentions of rival social media websites was banned.

In a drastic policy change, Twitter had banned the users from being able to link to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other platforms that had been described as “prohibited” by the company. After the policy was drastically criticized, Musk took an immediate U-turn apologizing and vowing to seek inputs through user survey going forward. “My apologies. Won’t happen again,” Musk tweeted, before he launched a new 12 hour poll asking if he should step down as head of Twitter. “I will abide by the results of this poll.”

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After just 20 minutes into polling, when the yes vote gained a double-digit lead, Musk said that he had already picked a new CEO, and wrote to a comment: “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.”

Musk said that the controversial policy would be adjusted to impact only accounts whose “primary purpose is promotion of competitors, which essentially falls under the no spam rule”. The banned platforms included websites such as Facebook and Instagram, and upstart rivals such as Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social. Twitter gave no explanation for why the blacklist included those seven websites but not others such as Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn, The Associated Press noted.

Last week, Twitter had disbanded its Trust and Safety Council, a volunteer group that was formed in 2016 to advise the platform on decisions. This had followed other series of controversial decisions by Elon Musk since he took over Twitter in October, including laying offs over half of its workforce and also senior management.